Words define a language, and in turn languages help to define cultures and societies. And people define words, as the last man who tried to define them all himself knew, in the process trying also to define and distinguish his developing nation

800 years ago, an Italian mathematician and world traveler brought the gift of digits to Europe, from India, through Arabia, and taught the West how to count, and calculate, and figure it all out

Vote for the person you want, somebody in charge counts ‘em up and then we find out the winner. As if. The many ways that can go wrong, and the importance of good design done well but somebody who knows how

When the market started to crash, the ticker, reliable source of up-to-the-second information, fell behind, and all of a sudden not knowing what you didn't know was worse than knowing, and the spiral went down and down from there

Two Thanksgivings! Twice the turkey, twice the parades, twice the football? Nope, but for a few years the nation was split by a presidential proclamation that didn't quite work as intended

How do you read words that aren't there? The towering idea of the Declaration of Independence, the passage on slavery deleted before its adoption, and the hole that silence has left behind

Encyclopedias have changed, due to the one you know - but actually the one you probably don't, and the ways in which we know the things we know are changing right along with them

The Richter Scale...isn't used any more, and the man who created it had a mind more sensitive to the movements of the earth than the subtleties of society

Hungry yet? The cookbook, and the woman, who standardized recipes and encouraged us all to think about food as science and art

Name after name, row after row, the wall, and the things we bring to it, including ourselves, all of which help us remember and reconcile